Towards a Postliberal Conservative Republicanism

The Only Way Back is Forward

This blog is dedicated, in large part, to fleshing out a new vision for conservatism. I call my vision “postliberal” because conservatism must be constructed in the shadow of the failure of “liberalism,” the defining ideology in America since the founding. Liberalism served America well in its infancy, but its dangerous tendencies become more and more evident as time goes on. My philosophy of “postliberal conservatism” draws upon insights from previous eras—above all the classical traditions of republicanism and natural law enunciated by Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and others—to recover a vision of the good life and healthy politics that is more attuned to human nature.

While postliberal conservative republicanism draws from these impressive resources, however, it does not seek simply to recreate ancient Greece or Rome. Not only would it be next to impossible to turn Washington DC into ancient Athens, doing so would be a disaster for human flourishing. Liberalism has been a force for good and has taught us many lessons, particularly about human nature, economic interaction, and republican governance. It is important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Nevertheless, abandoning liberalism requires jettisoning cherished American values, particularly our love of equality and absolute freedom. It will not be an easy task. The following sections describe liberalism, articulate why a postliberal form of politics is necessary, and briefly chart the strategy for building postliberal conservative republicanism.

Liberalism

Liberalism refers to the political philosophy that valorizes liberty as the supreme good. (This definition differs from contemporary American usage, where it tends to refer to left-wing politics or progressivism.) Liberalism views consent as the foundation of all legitimate associations, from the political community to the family: only freely chosen obligations are binding on free individuals. Further, liberals view with suspicion “any existing differentiation, distinction, boundary, and delineation,” from national borders to definitions of marriage, as “arbitrarily limiting individual choice” (Deneen 2018, xviii). Liberalism is individualistic at its core. While it does not rule out dedication to religion or other higher ends, these must be freely chosen and never coercive. The liberal state aims at neutrality and claims to reject the inculcation of any particular way of life or culture.

Liberalism comes in right-leaning and left-leaning varieties, both of which see individual freedom as the hallmark of the good life. Right-leaning individualists emphasize economic liberties and freedom of contract. At their most extreme, they are libertarians who (almost) deny the existence of public goods and strive to minimize state activity. Libertarians support radical freedom in the social and sexual realms but often refrain from openly hostility to traditional moral values (or even weakly support them if freely chosen). Left-leaning individualists emphasize personal and sexual freedom, view the traditional family and other social norms as restrictive and oppressive, and consider state redistribution of wealth to be a prerequisite for the equal autonomy of all. As Patrick Deneen writes in Why Liberalism Failed, both sides see the “good life” as marked by private consumption and license, but one side thinks the “free market” is more likely to produce these goods, while the other side thinks that state regulation and redistribution are better means to the same end. Both reject nature as a normative standard of right behavior.

Much about liberalism is valuable and good. The doctrines of individual rights and the necessity of consent favor democratic government and, at their best, serve as rallying cries to confront brutal or unjust regimes. The language of liberty is most precious when it confronts the arrogant designs of kings and autocrats. At the American founding, the liberal political theory of John Locke promoted the common good and allowed for a fuller extent of human flourishing among a virtuous people. The doctrine of individual rights associated with liberalism, moreover, protects the liberty of conscience from persecutory state churches, property rights from demagogic expropriators, and intellectual dialogue from bigoted censors. Individualism has undermined corrupt oligarchies and produced explosive economic growth which, even with its attendant problems, has lifted millions out of poverty worldwide. For this, it deserves to be praised. Any form of “postliberal” conservatism must carefully preserve any genuine advances flowing from liberalism.

Postliberalism

Despite its virtues, I believe it is time to abandon liberalism in favor of a “postliberal” form of political theory informed by natural law and classical republicanism.

Liberalism conceives of all constraints on personal freedom—whether laws or social customs or religious injunctions—as intolerable restrictions on liberty. The only form of state intervention it allows are laws to protect people from violating one another’s freedom and laws to give people their “rights” (education, health care, etc.). Both the police state and the welfare state are designed to promote human autonomy from interference by, or dependence on, other people. The problem is that personal autonomy, in its mature form, undermines the conditions necessary for human flourishing and even threatens liberty itself.

Liberalism’s destruction of all limits on individual freedom leads to license, not liberty. Liberalism erodes norms against premarital and extramarital sex, divorce, pornography, gambling, prostitution, drug use, etc. “Ironically, as behavior becomes unregulated in the social sphere, the state must be constantly enlarged through an expansion of lawmaking and regulatory activities” (Deneen 2018, xiv). Thus, for instance, the collapse of traditional sexual ethics led both to a ballooning welfare state—to help all of the “brave” single mothers raising children on their own—and to stricter scrutiny of male-female interaction in the name of protecting women against rape, drunken sex, and unwanted attention. In the economic realm, globalist capitalism undermines community, leads to mass migrations, replaces dignified jobs with cheap imports, and fosters the view that humans are rational, selfish, and disconnected. Choice becomes the watchword for everything, and everything is bought and sold.

Liberalism also prevents society from defining and pursuing a concrete vision of the “good life” (other than autonomy, of course), thus undermining traditional religion and other substantive philosophies of the human good. Skepticism reigns. Without a transcendent source of meaning or purpose, life becomes shallower, more disconnected, more atomized, more animalistic, and more consumeristic. Norms about individual autonomy protect us from an overbearing state but isolate us from one another. In addition, community is displaced by a borderless ideal of cosmopolitanism, which denigrates the idea of nationhood and sacrifices communal stability in the name of economic efficiency and the “right” to migrate. People are increasingly unable to form stable partnerships, from marriage to community organizations.

Even liberalism’s claim to be neutral between all ways of life is false. The school systems preach liberal doctrines such as autonomy and sexual license while prohibiting prayer or traditional moral teaching. Religious liberty and freedom of association are sacrificed to liberal ideas of non-discrimination, undermining the ability of social organizations to maintain their identity. Traditional parental obligations are recast as abusive, and parental responsibility for children is undermined, in the name of “liberating” children from the grip of their parents’ illiberal beliefs. At every turn, liberal societies discourage the inculcation of virtue and self-mastery and encourage dependence on oneself (for the strong) or the state (for the weak).

Liberalism survived so long because it drew upon what Burke calls “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages,” i.e. the traditional values and social structures, such as family and local community, that for centuries tutored humans in virtue and fostered human flourishing. That capital is all but spent. As society increasingly comes to mirror the most genuine form of liberalism, all limits on human autonomy are dissolved. The crowning expression of this triumph is seen mostly clearly in the transgender movement, which seeks liberation from human nature itself and the transformation of one’s body according to the whims of one’s brain. This is unsustainable, and liberal solutions cannot cure liberalism’s ills. A new form of politics is needed.

Postliberal Conservative Republicanism

Since the 1950s, American conservatism has been characterized by a “fusion” of liberal economic theory (i.e. libertarianism) and traditional morality. This so-called “fusionism” originated with William Buckley, the founder of National Review, and culminated with the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan. Reaganism was a good and even necessary movement, and members of the “new New Right” are too quick to dismiss or mock its virtues. Reaganism rolled back counterproductive regulations, slowed the expansion of the welfare state, launched a conservative legal movement that has produced some victories (though far fewer than hoped) and forestalled further legal change in favor of progressivism, and defeated communism and state socialism.

However, fusionism has always been unstable. The Reagan coalition won impressive electoral victories but found it difficult to craft a popular political vision. Traditional morality and “neoliberal” economics, while not intrinsically opposed, often push in different directions, inasmuch as the latter presumes the value of unfettered human choice and is indifferent to virtue. Libertarianism failed to garner support for its domestic policies and could not account for the apparent need for state intervention to promote the public good. For its part, traditional morality untethered from a coherent philosophical and ethical system was fundamentalist and legalistic, failing to present an attractive positive vision of human life. Ultimately, traditionalists began to suspect that economic libertarianism was the dominant partner in the conservative coalition, and that Christian conservatives, for instance, had been used for their votes but then largely ignored. Tax cuts and free trade seemed to be only conservative policies that actually got implemented. Disastrous wars waged in the name of the liberal dream of “spreading democracy” shattered public faith in the Republican Party.

Trump challenged conservative orthodoxy and won in 2016. He pursued an aggressively “America First” agenda by denouncing free trade, opposing mass immigration, rejecting foreign intervention, and criticizing America’s globalist elite class. Trump’s success pushed conservatives to rethink their traditional commitments to neoliberal capitalism and a neoconservative foreign policy. While perhaps the furthest thing from a paragon of classical or Christian virtue, Trump ironically laid the groundwork for the emergence of a postliberal conservatism.

In this context, this blog seeks to construct a renewed version of classical republicanism, albeit one informed by some of the policies and practices of liberalism (though not its underlying philosophy of individual autonomy). We cannot return to a pristine past, and the past wasn’t so pristine to begin with. The subtitle of this blog, “the only way back is forward,” signals my belief that a new conservatism must be built in the shadow of liberalism, with a clear understanding of the deficiencies of ancient philosophies and the ways  in which liberal values such as individual rights can promote the achievement of republican ends. As Charles Taylor (1992; 2007) notes, we are all “expressive individualists” now, and if we are not, it is because we have chosen not to be. Postliberal conservative republicanism must be attractive to liberal individuals and attuned to liberal sensibilities.

I will appeal primarily to two substantive political theories, while drawing on liberal insights where I can. The first is classical republicanism, which promoted popular rule without buying into liberal autonomy. Under classical republicanism, liberty referred not to unlimited autonomy but to “the condition of self-governance, whether achieved by the individual or by a political community” (Deneed 2018, xiii). This form of liberty required constraining the human tendency towards vices such as selfishness, violence, and indifference, which sapped the virtue and self-control necessary to govern oneself. Classical republicanism thus tolerates substantial interference in humans’ behavior with a view toward helping them to achieve their highest potential. As Aristotle says, because the political community exists not just “for the sake of staying alive” but “for the sake of living well,” it is concerned fundamentally with “good and bad, just and unjust.” Justice and law are necessary, he continues, “[f]or as human beings are the best of all animals when perfected, so they are the worst when divorced from law and right. … Consequently, if a human being lacks virtue, he is a must unholy and savage thing, and when it comes to food and sex, the worst” (Politics 1.2). The form of social control exercised in classical republicanism consisted as much of custom as of law. Both worked together to foster habits of mind and character that would many to achieve their purpose as human beings. Postliberal conservatism will be communal and paternalistic. It views individual autonomy negatively because, left to our own devices, humans rarely produce the virtue necessary to produce individual or social happiness.

I also draw upon natural law theory. To say that virtue is necessary in a polity leaves open the question of what virtue is and how to achieve it. Here the insights of natural law thinking are useful. Aquinas in particular sketches a view of primary human goods that ought to be pursued, such as life, health, knowledge, reproduction and family, community, and religion. The political community and its laws ought to be directed, not toward the promotion of individual autonomy, but the fostering of the panoply of natural human goods.

The resulting policy proposals will not fit into existing ideological confines. State intervention may be helpful or counterproductive depending on the circumstances. Rather than taking a narrow-minded “limited government” stance, I will pragmatically adopt a variety of policies, with a view to their effects on human flourishing. Polling shows there is already substantial support for a version of conservatism that is moderate or pragmatic on issues of economic liberty. The following graph aligns voters in the 2016 presidential election along two dimensions: social/identity and economic.

The upper left quadrant comprises voters who tended to be “socially conservative” but “economically liberal/progressive.” Many of these people voted for Trump. It is in this quadrant that many of my recommended policies will lie. Rejecting doctrinaire economic ideologies—on both the left and right—will allow me to incorporate diverse insights from across the political spectrum.

I hope you join me on my journey towards postliberal conservative republicanism. After all, the only way back is forward.

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Politics of Aristotle. Trans. Peter L. Phillips Simpson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Deneen, Patrick. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.